Barren Grounds - Finally I Got My Ground Parrot :-)

Back in Australia and back to Barren Grounds Nature Reserve. The faithful readers out there will remember that I have been to Barren Grounds at least twice while blogging; the trip with Jarrod where we saw the Jewel Spider and when Gemma and I had a (nearly too) close encounter with a Highlands Copperhead. In total I have probably made the trip south 5 times, so why keep going when you have already seen all that stuff? ;-)

Well, despite of all those visits, I had only seen 1 of the 2 birds Barren Grounds is famous for: Eastern Bristlebird, ca. 2 years ago I was down there and saw half a dozen of them running around in less than 1 hour, but on every single visit I have dipped on the Ground Parrot! Despite of missing 5 times, Barren Ground is still the best spots in the universe to go if you want to see Ground Parrot, Pezoporus wallicus, it is simply just a tricky bird to see.

Finally, the little green-feathered parrot decided to show :-) We had two sightings, firstly a bird in flight which I did not manage to get photos of and ca. 1 hour later, but not to far away from our first sighting, we got views of a bird in high grass ca. 25 meters in front of us on the path, I managed to get a few poor photos of that one, I cannot rule out that it was not the same bird.

Good stuff! Quite happy to finally get decent views of this little secretive gem. Apart from the GP we saw very few bird, it could be because weather was less than impressive. Strong winds, cloudy and so little light, that it nearly felt like evening - maybe that had helped us, since the GP is famous for only showing during early morning and at dusk. Only one other bird qualifies for the blog - Beautiful Firetail above is always a good spot.

Hopefully I will still go to Barren Grounds once and a while, it is great bushwalking down there and after having finally covered most of the birds flying around at the plateau, I can just concentrate more on all the other stuff making it worth getting your lazy bum of the sofa. :-)

Barren Grounds Nature Reserve

Jarrod convinced me that we needed to go to Barren Grounds Nature Reserve for a bit of bushwalking. I was easily convinced since BGNR is a great place to walk, but more importantly it sports a unique type of habitat, hanging swamp plateau, that is home to a great selection of wildlife that is otherwise very hard to find. Some celebrity inhabitants are Ground Parrot, Eastern Bristlebird and Southern Emu-wren - I needed the GP and Jarrod, who more or less has to hold a bird in the hand before he is convinced that he actually has truly seen it, have so far managed to avoid eye contact with the SEW.

Weather was not on our side - at all! Wet and windy and a annoying fog hanging low above the scrub made it nearly impossible to spot anything further away than arms reach, however, as always there is something going on when you get you lazy arse off the couch and the humid air had the advantage that it was much easier than normal to spot the various spider webs along the path, which resulted in an encounter with what might just be the prettiest spider I have ever seen: Gasteracantha minax or Jewel Spider between friends :-)

I am terribly sorry about the poor quality of the pictures, having expected a sunny day on the highland heath I had not brought the macro lens and even if I had I would probably not have been super happy changing lenses in the middle of all the wind and wetness. So you will have to do with high ISO and pseudo macro capability in combo with the spider sitting on a very bouncy branch.

Having seen next to no birds the entire day, it was quite a bit of a surprise when the Bassian Thrush in the picture above suddenly appeared on the path in front of us. Those of you who follow the blog regularly will know that it was the only new bird I managed to (nearly) see down in Wilson's Promontory so quite nice getting another (less than medium good) look at it.

Walking in Australia is often limited by how much water you can carry, not having that problem this particular day, we decided to get some kilometers in the boots and managed to clock up 20km before we were back at the Magna - not bad going for a lazy Saturday :-)

All good, great walking and a beautiful drive down south. My trusted co-pilot had once again(?) managed to get us (more or less!) straight to our target location - with a little telephonic help from his better half at home :-D On our way home the only unforeseen happening was the timing of a few hundred cows deciding that the grass was greener on the other side - but I blame no one for that ;-)

Barren Grounds

Last weekend the plan had been to go for some camping, but with the outlook of strong winds and potential showers we decided to hedge our bets and not plan too far in advance. A wet and windy start to the Saturday called off the camping - guess the Magna will stay packed till next time :-) We had an excellent day down town Sydney again. But decided to get out for a bit of excitement if possible Sunday.

Sunday morning we headed towards Barren Grounds Nature Reserve. A heathland plateau just west of Kiama, south west of Wollongong, a hotspot for Eastern Bristlebird and wildflowers. Driving down south we soon realized that it was probably not going to be a super duper birding day, it was all sunny and lovely, but so windy that no sane birds would be out and about.

Did not matter so much, we were up for a bit of walking and there is always something going on when you get your lazy bum of the chair and into some good quality Australian nature. This time we were up for a real treat! Walking down the path one of us in each rut, we suddenly heard a bird calling behind us, I pulled the Bigma up turned around and took a step back in the direction we had just come from and was immediately greeted with a chilling hiss of a good sized snake lying on the path just in between where we had pasted few seconds ago. The snake most have decided to stay put while we passed, but obviously felt threatened when I decided to return, not only was it hissing, but had also taken the good old cobra position - head high and ready to strike less than a meter from my foot!

Well well, obviously the snake wanted me to stop so why not - I hit the brakes and the snake decided it was happy and started crawling into the scrub. Having the camera ready I managed to get a few pictures before our little friend vanished. According to the NPWS Atlas of NSW wildlife there should only be Tiger Snakes and Red-bellied black snakes at Barren Grounds, but looking through my snake book I would have guessed it was a Highlands Copperhead ... any thoughts are welcome.

Needless to say that we did keep a close eye at the path for the rest of the walk :-) The walk was actually much better than expected. Lots of wildflowers in bloom, vistas and a great bit of very different nature just a good solid stone throw south of Sydney.